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The impotence epidemic : men's medicine and sexual desire in contemporary China / Everett Yuehong Zhang.

LIBRA RC889 .Z48 2015
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Format:
Author/Creator:
Series:
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
Medical Subjects:
Physical Description:
xii, 288 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Place of Publication:
Durham : Duke University Press, 2015.
Summary:
Since the 1990s China has seen a dramatic increase in the number of men seeking treatment for impotence. Everett Yuehong Zhang argues in The Impotence Epidemic that this trend represents changing public attitudes about sexuality in an increasingly globalized China. In this ethnography he shifts discussions of impotence from being a purely neurovascular phenomenon to a social one Zhang contextualizes impotence within the social changes brought by recent economic reform and through the production of various desires in post-Maoist China. Drawing on Interviews with 350 men and their partners from Beijing and Chengdu, and concerned with de-mystifying and de-stigmatizing impotence, Zhang suggests that the impotence epidemic represents not just trauma and suffering, but also a contagion of individualized desire and an affirmation for living a full life. For Zhang, studying male impotence in China is one way to comprehend the unique experience of Chinese modernity. Book jacket.
Contents:
  • The birth of nanke (men's medicine)
  • Sexual repression
  • One thousand bodies of impotence
  • Impotence, family, and women
  • The loss of jing (seminal essence) and the revival of yangsheng (the cultivation of life)
  • Bushen (nourishing the kidney), shugan (smoothing out the liver) or taking the great brother (Viagra)
  • Potency is fullness of life
  • Conclusion: If shen (the kidney) is strong, life is good.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-276) and index.
ISBN:
  • 9780822358442
  • 0822358441
  • 9780822358565
  • 0822358565
OCLC:
878023951

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